opened, the flames flapped, and the coffin slid smoothly down into the fiery sea. The doors closed, the nurse rose and made for the door, the clergyman smiled gently from behind the slipway, like a conjurer who has produced his nine hundred and fortieth rabbit without a hitch.
It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian Poppy. She liked a funeral but it was with horror as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her, life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as what came after--but to her death was the end of everything. At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day. She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the psychical research headquarters, a voice she'd heard once at a seance saying: 'Everything is very beautiful on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere.'
Flowers, Ida thought scornfully--that wasn't life.
Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up. Life was poor Fred's mouth pressed down on her in the taxi, vibrating with the engine along the parade. What was the sense of dying if it made you babble of flowers?
Fred didn't want flowers, he wanted and the enjoyable distress she had felt in Henneky's returned. She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in. To lose your lover 'broken hearts,' she would say, 'always mend' to be maimed or blinded 'lucky,' she'd tell you, 'to be alive at all.' There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism, whether she was laughing in Henneky's or weeping at a funeral or a marriage.
She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.
People passing up the flowery suburban road looked up and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces. Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.
But while she wept a determination grew: it grew all the way to the tram lines which would lead her back to her familiar territory, to the bars and the electrie signs and the variety theatres. Man is made by the places in which he lives, and Ida's mind worked with the simplicity and the regularity of a sky sign: the ever-tipping glass, the ever- revolving wheel, the plain question flashing on and off: 'Do You Use Forhan's for the Gums?' I'd do as much for Tom, she thought, for Clarence, that old deceitful ghost in Henneky's, for Harry. It's the least you can do for anyone ask questions, questions at inquests, questions at stances. Somebody had made Fred unhappy, and somebody was going to be made unhappy in turn.
An eye for an eye. If you believed in God, you might leave vengeance to Him, but you couldn't trust the One, the universal spirit. Vengeance was Ida's, just as much as reward was Ida's, the soft gluey mouth affixed in taxis, the warm handclasp in cinemas, the only reward there was. And vengeance and reward they both were fun.
The tram tingled and sparked down the Embankment. If it was a woman who had made Fred unhappy, she'd tell her what she thought. If Fred had killed himself, she'd find it out, the papers would print the news, someone would suffer. Ida was going to begin at the beginning and work right on. She was a sticker.
The first stage (she had held the paper in her hand all through the service) was Molly Pink, 'described as a private secretary,' employed by Messrs. Carter & Galloway.
Ida came up from Charing Cross Station into the hot and windy light in the Strand flickering on the carburetors--in an upper room of Stanley Gibbons's a man with a long grey Edwardian moustache sat in a [ 49 ] P A IV T O N E window examining a postage stamp through a magnifying glass--a great dray laden with barrels stamped by, and the fountains played in Trafalgar Square, a cool translucent flower blooming and dropping into the drab sooty basins. It'll cost money, Ida repeated to herself, it always costs money if you want to know the truth, and she w r alked slowly up St. Martin's Lane, calculating, while all the time beneath the melancholy and the resolution, her heart beat faster to the refrain: it's exciting, it's fun, it's living. In Seven Dials the Negroes were hanging round the Royal Oak doors in tight natty suitings and old school ties, and Ida recognized one of them and passed the time of day. 'How's business, Joe?' The great white teeth went on like a row of lights in the darkness above the bright striped shirt. 'Fine, Ida, fine.'
'And the hay fever?'
'Tur'ble, Ida, tur'ble.'
'So long, Joe.'
'So long, Ida.'
It was a quarter of an hour's walk to Messrs. Carter & Galloway's, who were at the very top of a tall building on the outskirts of Gray's Inn. She had to economize now: she wouldn't even take a bus--and when she got to the dusty antiquated building, there wasn't a lift. The long flights of stone stairs wearied Ida. She'd had a long day and nothing to eat but a bun at the station. She sat down on a window sill and took off her shoes. Her feet were hot, she wiggled her toes. An old gentleman came down. He had a long moustache and a sidelong raffish look. He wore a check coat, a yellow waistcoat, and a grey bowler. He took off his bowler.
'In distress, madam?' he said, peering down at Ida with little bleary eyes. 'Be of assistance?' 7 'I don't allow anyone else to scratch my toes,' Ida said.
'Ha, ha,' the old gentleman said, 'a card. After my own heart. Up or down?'
'Up. All the way to the top.'
'Carter & Galloway. Good firm. Tell 'em I sent you.'
'What's your name?'
'Moyne. Charlie Moyne. Seen you here before.'
'Never.'
'Some place else. Never forget fine figure of a woman. Tell 'em Mpyne sent you. Give you special terms.'
'Why don't they have a lift in this place?'
'Old-fashioned people. Old-fashioned myself. Seen you at Epsom.'
'You might have.'
'Always tell a sporting woman. Ask you round the corner to split a bottle of fizz if those beggars hadn't taken the last fiver I came out with. Wanted to go and lay a couple. Have to go home first. Odds'll go down while I'm doing it. You'll see. You couldn't oblige me, I suppose? Two quid, Charlie Moyne.' The bloodshot eyes watched her without hope, a little aloof and careless; the buttons on the yellow waistcoat stirred as the old heart hammered.
'Here,' Ida said, 'you can have a quid--now run along.'
'Awfully kind of you. Give me your card. Post you a cheque tonight.'
'I haven't got a card,' Ida said.
'Came out without mine too. Never mind. Charlie Moyne. Care of Carter & Galloway. All know me here.'
'That's all right,' Ida said. 'I'll see you again. I've got to be going on up.'
'Take my arm.' He helped her up. 'Tell 'em Moyne sent you. Special terms.' She looked back at the turn of the stairs. He vas tucking the pound note away in his waistcoat, smoothing the moustache which was still golden at the tips, like a cigarette smoker's fingers, setting his bowler at an angle. Poor old geezer > Ida thought, he never expected to get that, watching him go off down the stairs in his jaunty and ancient despair.
There were only two doors on the top landing. She opened one marked 'Enquiries,' and there without a doubt was Molly Pink. In a little room hardly larger than a broom cupboard she sat beside a gas ring sucking a sweet. A kettle hissed at Ida as she entered. A swollen spotty face glared back at her without a word.
'Excuse me,' Ida said.
'The partners is out.'
'I came to see you.'
The mouth fell a little open, a lump of toffee stirred on the tongue, the kettle whistled.
'Me?'
'Yes,' Ida said. 'You'd better look out. The kettle'll boil over. You are Molly Pink?'
'You want a cup?' The room was lined from floor to ceiling with files. A little window disclosed through the undisturbed dust of many years another block of buildings with the same arrangement of windows staring dustily
